Hi!  Thank you for praying for our flood relief efforts.  Pete had been putting in very full days, sometimes not coming home for lunch.  We needed your prayers! 

In the first days after the flood, there were many meetings.   

• One of the first caught Pete off guard:  a meeting led by the president of the country!  Blaise Compaore declared a week of solidarity for Burkina Faso and said, “before we can ask others to give, we should be able to give ourselves.”  He gave $20,000, followed by the president of the assembly and the prime minister.  He asked other organizations to give sacrificially –and promised an accounting of the gifts.  Many went up.  There was even a child who gave his snack money.  We are proud of our country that so often needs help from outside sources! 

• Later that week, Pete, Robert, the director of Accedes, our church’s development arm, and Steve, our director, gave gifts in the name of Accedes, the mission, and CAMA services.  We were hoping to be an encouragement to those within the government whom we have befriended, and to show our support of how the government has responded to the crisis.  The Minister of social action personally noted his appreciation.  The exciting thing for Pete was being able to drive right up to the presidential palace where the gifts were being collected! 

• Pete was included in a meeting with leaders from aid organizations.  There are 88 official sites that are receiving help from the World Food program and USAID through Catholic Relief Services.  They committed to supply food to the sites for 4 weeks.  The government emphasized the importance of letting them know what individual organizations are doing so money wasn’t wasted and things weren’t duplicated.  Pete was impressed with the effort that was made towards efficiency. 

• The government sites received medical care from Doctors Without Borders, medicines, food, sleeping mats, clothes, and police protection. 

In addition to meeting with the government and aid organizations, Pete and Robert

toured to find areas which weren’t receiving adequate help.    

• They asked our churches to assess the damage that their church people, and that families sponsored through Compassion Int’l had suffered.  3 of these churches were housing people not receiving any government aid.  6 churches in all received aid for 148 families.

• Thanks to the gifts towards the first phase of the project ($24,000), Pete and Robert were able to hand out rice, corn, yams, medicines, mats, blankets, toothbrushes, clothes, and potties to our church people and Compassion Int’l families in need, and to the mayors in every place where we have a church.

• They noticed one of the immediate needs among official and non-official sites were potties!  The children weren’t allowed to go in the already overloaded toilets, so they were just voiding in the courtyards of the schools.  Disease wasn’t far behind.  With potties, the parents would be able to at least carry the waste outside the walls.  Pete & Robert bought as many potties as they could find in Ouaga and in Bobo (1800) and passed them out!  Pete was even televised on the evening news, handing a potty to a mayor!

• They toured some of the government sites as well – if you remember the school that we had mentioned in our last letter with 200 families?  The number of refugees there grew to 3,000!

• They also noticed that two of the government sites near our Christian high school somehow hadn’t gotten any food.  Pete was proud to tell Sammy that because Sammy’s friend was the son of the woman responsible for the food distribution through Catholic Relief Services, Pete could let her know of their plight.  She made sure 2 people on site received training in distribution, and offered food for a week.  We have been supplying 31 families with food since.  It was exciting to Sammy to know the part he had in helping those people stay alive.

• Pete and Robert sent 200 sacs of grain to villages outside of Ouaga that had also been hit by the flood.

• During this whole process, Pete learned much from Robert about dealing with a crisis from the perspective of an aid organization. 

As a family, we went out one day to visit the Sector 30 church, which housed 15 refugees.  We bought rice, vegetables, and oil for a meal.  Pete found lamps they could use at night while we played with the children.   

One of the shocking things was to see that some of the houses that had started to fall during the flood are now completely demolished, and erosion from the following rains has set in. 

School in Burkina officially started on Oct. 2.  The government has been adamant that classes open on time, so many of the refugees have already been moved out to tent cities on administrative reserves.  Some are still in schools.  The ones in our churches have, since the time I began this newsletter, been moved too. 

LOOKING AHEAD AND PRAYER REQUESTS… 

• Pete and Robert have determined what the next phase in aid will look like: coming up with enough food, formula for babies, and medicine for 400 people (at the 2 “forgotten” sites) for 1 month, or until the crops start coming in.  ACCEDES is also starting a new project to help pay for kids to go to school and start rebuilding homes in places where there isn’t zoning planned.  This project is for close to $100,000.  Pray for the funding.  The Belgian government may have a project available for rebuilding flood-damaged homes.  Pray that we can tap into this.  If you are interested in helping, you may send your gifts to CAMA services, Burkina Faso Flood relief, C&MA PO.
  
  Box 35000, Colorado Springs, CO

  80935

  .

• Please pray for a good strategy to get these people out of tents into homes.  With the speed at which things move in Africa, many of us can just imagine that these tent cities will become semi-permanent dwellings, which can’t be a healthy situation in a city environment. 

• The government has had some problems with land zoning in the past, with squatters, with people it owes property to.  Many of these problems are in the areas that we are helping.  Pray that those in leadership will have the wisdom to take advantage of this flood to solve these issues and begin the next step in the zoning process. 

• Here is an amazing answer to prayer: 3 days after the flood, we were to get more rain, but , the storms, as seen from satellite, miraculously went around Ouaga!  We found out later that had it had rained, part of the city’s enormous water reservoir would have collapsed.  The result could have been disastrous!  THANKS to those of you who prayed (thanks to facebook!)

• Continue to pray for people to come to Christ through this disaster.  We are excited that at least 3 Muslim women we know of have accepted Christ through the ministry of one church. 

Take care!  Pete,